In today's world, many people are justifiably worried about contracting some sort of communicable disease. Many of these people are in professions that cause them to come into contact with many strangers, and the fear of the unknown may create great anxiety.
This fear of contacting a communicable disease also manifests itself in rules requiring food service personnel to wear gloves and hats when handling food, in rules requiring special packaging for food and other such items, and the like.
This fear is, of course, most apparent in association with public facilities. One such public facility that has received such attention is a public telephone. Since a telephone is used in close association with a user's face and mouth, this worry can be quite genuine in its basis, and can cause apprehension for some workers who are required to use public telephones as part of their job. Telephone repairmen are an example of such workers, especially if these repairmen are assigned to a job of maintaining public telephones.
For this reason, the art has included several proposals for covering a telephone handset or parts thereof to prevent direct contact between such handset and a user. However, while somewhat successful, these known coverings have several drawbacks which limit the effectiveness thereof.
For example, many of these devices do not cover and encase the entire handset, and thus leave exposed areas which can contain germs that can be transmitted to a user. Other ones of these covers are intended for re-use thereby vitiating the advantages thereof by exposing the cover to the possibility of carrying germs from one place to another and thus may expose a user to germs contacted in a prior use of the cover. The reusable covers also create a problem for others by, possibly, carrying germs from one handset to another. This may expose a later user of a second handset to germs that have been carried to that handset from another handset by the cover.
Accordingly, there is a need for a telephone handset cover which can totally encase a telephone handset in a manner that does not create a problem with exposing some areas of the handset to the user and which can be re-used without unduly exposing the user, or subsequent users, to germs that may have been contacted by the cover during a prior use thereof.